


Golden Afternoon

by Nerdofmanytalents



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dad!Cullen, F/M, Family, Fluff, Gen, Parenthood, Romance, and cathartic, this was gratuitous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 16:03:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7721089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerdofmanytalents/pseuds/Nerdofmanytalents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen has a visitor in his office one afternoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> My finger slipped. Oops.

Cullen looked up from his stacks of paperwork at the sound of tiny footfalls approaching his open door from the direction of the main keep. As soon as he spotted the bright aureola of golden curls headed his way, he couldn’t keep a grin off his face.

 

“Little Lizzy cub, have you escaped your keeper again?”

 

“Pa!”

 

The footfalls sped up as she entered and the toddler disappeared briefly below the view of his desk before she appeared at his side, hands scrabbling at his knees.

 

“Pa! Papa, up!” 

 

He laughed softly, pulling her up into his lap and adjusting her rumpled tunic and smoothing some of the unruly curls out of her face. She stood happily on his thighs, burying her hands in the fur of his cloak and he was glad he had forgone his armor today and simply worn the cloak and a tunic. It was then that he noticed that she was missing a shoe.

 

“Lizzy-cub, where is your shoe?”

 

She paused for a second, looking down at her feet in puzzlement. 

 

“Shoe. Oh no.”

 

“Yes, your shoe is gone. I wonder where you left it. Your nanny will not be pleased if you lost it,” he mock scolded, and she giggled softly as she buried her face in her hands.

 

“Oh no. No nanny, no no! Papa!”

 

“No? I shan’t take you back to nanny?” He asked with a laugh, fingers curling against her ribs and eliciting a squeal.

 

“Nooo! No papa no!”

 

One hand shot out to cradle her head protectively she lurched abruptly and nearly banged her head against his desk. After a few moments her squeals tapered off into giggles, and she looked back up at him through her lashes.

 

“Slee,” she said with a wide grin that reminded him entirely of her mother.

 

He puzzled the word for a second; it seemed every day she was picking up new words and phrases. Most times they were the normal fair; names of people, food, objects and so on. Occasionally she somehow picked up something less than favorable, usually courtesy of Sera or Varric. However they were usually difficult to figure out until she’d used them a few times.

 

“‘Slee?’ What’s ‘slee,’ Lizzy-cub? What’s ‘slee?’” He inquired encouragingly, moving her to sit on the edge of his desk.

 

“Papa slee. Ticka-ticka,” she said happily, scrunching her fingers out at him in a slightly grabby motion, and the word finally clicked. He chuckled.

 

“Oh, _silly?_ Papa is silly? I thought Lizzy likes tickles.”

 

She giggled breathlessly, tensing in anticipation as he flexed his hand in her direction. He couldn’t help but laugh at the motion, moving to simply cup the side of her head.

 

“Alright little cub. No tickles. No nanny. You can stay with papa. We’ll be heading to supper soon anyhow.”

 

She squirmed towards the edge of the desk. 

 

“Down. Down.”

 

“Where are you going?” He asked as he lifted her to set her down on mismatched feet. She immediately rushed over to the bookshelf in the corner, reaching as high as she could.

 

“Book,” she pointed, looking back at him as she reached. He headed over, grabbing one of the few picture books stashed there that Josephine had given them as a gift for Lizzy’s nameday.

 

“Alright, we’ll read one story, then we’ll go find mama and have supper.”

 

He picked her back up before heading back to his chair and situating them both. She was surprisingly engrossed, listening as he read some story about a sleeping princess in a tower guarded by a dragon, and after only a few pages he felt her weight go limp in his arms and heard her breathing go even and slow.

 

He slowly closed the book and set it on his desk, before pressing a soft kiss to the top of her head. He looked down at her sleeping face as he gently wrapped one of her long ringlets of golden hair around his finger, a deep feeling of overwhelming happiness filling him.

 

If someone had told him five years before that he would be holding this precious child in his arms, he would have thrown them on their own arse in a heartsick fit of anger. To begin with, Templars were rarely permitted to wed. And in those exceptions that they were, the idea of children was greatly discouraged. He had been in templar training for a year before he realized that his dream of serving would not mesh well with the idea of a family, and that there would be no curly haired Rutherford children of his own. As a boy of 14, that had been a surprise but he had seen it as a fair tradeoff to follow his dream. 

 

Over time, serving had only solidified the fact that families and templars were not compatible in his mind. He'd seen templars who had been permitted to marry have those marriages fall apart. The stress of serving the Chantry was always a factor, but even worse was the addiction to lyrium. Retired templars brought back to the Chantry by tearful wives who couldn't understand why their husbands woke up one day and couldn't remember them struck hard at his heart, and at the tender age of 17 he'd sworn he would never do that to anyone. He could bear that burden in exchange for the right to serve, there was honor in that sacrifice, but he would not ask it of someone else. 

 

The following years had all but squashed any remaining desire he had had for love and family. The horrible twisting of those desires at the hands of demons left him with cold sweats for years whenever the thought crossed his mind. Eventually, with time and meditation, he was able to disassociate the memories from his torture at Kinloch, and in the last years in Kirkwall he subconsciously turned to them for comfort. Meredith’s spiral into insanity left him frayed, and in his attempts to be the buffer between her and the world left him with a sense of crippling loneliness. There were all too many late nights it seemed as though those frail imaginings of an imaginary woman tucking small imaginary children into their beds were the only thing that kept him from slipping into madness himself. 

 

Inevitably, the mornings that followed those desperate dreams still filled him with self loathing. He was a cowardly and broken man, barely able keep the fragile tensions between the mages under his charge and the men who looked to him for direction from flying apart at the seams. Who was he to imagine he had anything to offer that imaginary woman, how could he expect to offer a father's comfort to a child in their nightmares when he couldn't go a night without waking from his own screaming and covered in sweat?

 

A sleepy mumble and a small wiggle from the child in his arms drew his thoughts away from the painful turn they had taken, and he felt a wry smile make its way onto his face. Elizabeth and Evelyn… far exceeded anything he could have dreamed during that dark time. At the time he'd left Kirkwall he had been so focused on making change in this chaos, that that dream had been all but forgotten. How fitting that it was within months of that that the love of his life would quite literally fall out of the Fade and turn everything on its ear.

 

It hadn’t been easy. The lyrium withdrawals had been nearly unbearable; they still were at times. But every moment of it had led to this, and he would go through every moment of it a thousand times again if it led to here.

 

“It does dangerous things to my heart when I see you like this.”

 

He looked to the doorway to see his wife in the doorway, one hand resting against the frame and a small shoe dangling from the other. He smiled.

 

“Dangerous how?”

 

She entered into the room, before coming around to sit on the lip of his desk, setting down the shoe next to her.

 

“It makes me want another,” she said with a small laugh, reaching to touch one of Elizabeth’s curls.

 

“Would that be such a bad thing?” He joked, before nuzzling his nose into Elizabeth’s hair.

 

There was a small pause.

 

“..No, it wouldn’t.”

 

His eyes shot up to hers questioningly, before he reached to take her hand and press a soft kiss to her knuckles.

 

“Truly?” He asked softly, and she nodded.

 

“Not...right this minute,” she murmured with a wry smile. “But...soon. Soon would be...nice.”

 

He couldn’t help the grin that came across his face.

 

“Soon. That _would_ be nice.”

**Author's Note:**

> Favorite parts, commentary, bookmarks, kudos, whatever! All are precious as gold to me. Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to drop me a line on tumblr.


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